


effortless, effortless

by magdaliny



Series: quiet americans [8]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-06 23:19:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13421754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magdaliny/pseuds/magdaliny
Summary: “Darling,” Peggy says, “You look radiant.”





	effortless, effortless

### December 2017

 

“Darling,” Peggy says, “You look radiant.”

“Look who's talking,” Steve says, but he knows he's flushing up behind the flowers he's carrying. He puts the vase on her bedside table and takes a long look before he goes to her. Sitting at the desk under the window, caught in the middle of writing a letter, she's a picture: her long neck just as elegant as it was in '43, when Steve'd been trying not to look at it during drills and mostly failing. She watches him come over, fingertips resting on the barrel of her pen. He leans on the handles of her wheelchair and kisses her temple. “Who're you writing?” he asks.

“Pearl,” Peggy says, “Pearl Boyd. You won't know of her, I expect. She was one of my agents in the late fifties. Devastating sniper, looked like Lillian Gish. She was injured on a mission in '61 and took up show business instead—she had this ingenious set of wooden legs carved and she'd bring the house down when she kicked up her skirts. Lovely woman.”

“Sounds like a firecracker.” Redundant; Steve suspects there hadn't been a single dull mouse in Peggy's stable of agents, unless you counted the girls who were good at pretending to be one.

Peggy smirks at him as if she can read his mind. “Oh, it would've been a treat to have you in Los Angeles.”

Steve laughs with her, but: he does wonder.

Peggy asks him what he's being doing, so he tells her—about the VA, how one of the young vets spoke last week for the first time in a year and a half; the new fabric-painting workshop he's trying to convince himself is a terrible idea because no one's going to _not_ make a shirt with a dirty word on it—the last two days he's spent with Sam, getting all their Christmas shopping done in one fell swoop, the crazed customers and the bad carollers and the astonishingly well-trained dachshunds somebody'd brought to sit on Mall Santa's lap—going in with Darcy to hold her hand while she got her first tattoo.

“And how is James?” Peggy asks, when he winds down.

Steve opens his mouth and—closes it. He'd been about to say _He's fine_ , which would've been the easy answer, move on, next topic, but he hates to withhold things from Peggy. Too late for her not to notice his hesitation, Steve says, “He's good, he's keeping busy.”

Peggy lets that twitch on the table for a beat. Two. Then she says, “Let's go out into the garden.”

 

☆

 

“He's anxious about it,” Steve tries to explain, after Carlos has helped bundle Peggy up in a wool coat and scarf and a couple of blankets; one of the grandkids has knitted her a slouchy hat big enough for her to tuck all her hair into like a snood. Steve tries to remember how James had phrased it, what he'd said—confessed, really, trying too hard to make it sound casual—the night before Steve'd left for Washington: _S'alright, I can find another place easy enough, ain't like I can't afford it_. “He's convinced he's living on borrowed time. I told him Susan wouldn't ever just kick him out but I don't think he believed me.”

“Of _course_ she wouldn't,” Peggy says. She clicks her tongue. “Poor thing. You've no idea how to reassure him?”

“I dunno. I might call Susan and ask her to write something, y'know. Pseudo-legal-sounding. Let him know she doesn't have any plans for—but then he'd know I told her. I think it'd embarrass him.” Steve sighs. “He's—he really is happy, though. Aside from that. You should see him, Pegs! Well, I guess you'd—you'd've had to have seen him before, but. He's so...” Steve trails off and then laughs. “Sorry.”

“Goodness, don't be,” Peggy says. “You so rarely talk about him.”

“I never know what to say.”

“I understand that,” Peggy says, after a moment, sounding a little surprised. “When people ask me about Gabe these days I think: well, he was gentle, and kind, and fierce, and—I think of all these nonsense words that don't explain him at all, really. It's so hard to speak about someone you know too well. One doesn't know where one ought to stop.”

“I—yeah,” Steve says. “Yeah.”

Peggy takes her hands out from under the blankets and rests them on the arm of her wheelchair, leaning towards him. Steve reaches automatically, chafing them lightly between his hands. “Will you—thank you, darling. Will you tell me what he's like, when he's very happy? I can't say that I remember Barnes laughing terribly often; he always seemed to me very—shuttered, very sad. Though I'm sure before the war he wasn't anything of the sort.”

“He's,” Steve says. He discards several sentences as bad poetry and tries coming at it sideways. “He talks all the time about how lucky he is. At first I didn't get it, but. I mean, after everything that happened to him, I couldn't get my head around it. _Lucky_. If that's lucky—!” Steve shakes his head. “I don't think it's a case of him saying he's able to appreciate nice things more because of what he went through. Or even that the past's the past and it doesn't matter because he's happy now. It's more like—”

Peggy presses his fingers encouragingly when he loses the thread.

“Like he really thinks he _is_ lucky,” Steve finishes lamely. “I think sometimes he tells himself all the ways it could've been a whole lot worse, and he finds that really—comforting, or it seems that way, at least, and that gets him up every morning. Lights him on fire. Really, literally, it lights him up. I think that's about as close as I can get to describing what it's like when he's—you know. Like that; just.” Steve opens his hands. “Striking matches.”

Peggy looks at him. He wonders if she's—and then she says, cannily, “Go on.”

Jesus. Okay.

“I had this horrible thought the other day,” Steve says to the paving stones between them. “At least I thought it was awful at the time. I thought that I was really glad that I got to—that you got to live a life and I got to meet you again, later. When you'd had all those years. Because I don't think,” forcing himself to look up: “I don't think I would've been very good. To you. Back then.”

“I like to believe I could have straightened you out,” Peggy says, warm and amused, and Steve ducks his chin. “Wrong phrasing, though. You would have been very good _to_ me, Steve. Perhaps _for_ me is what you meant. It would have been difficult, I rather think, for both of us to watch one another risk our lives on a weekly basis. But...you said 'thought'.”

Steve's been nodding, so he stops and says, “Yeah. Well. I guess I thought it was kind of sick, being glad about that. But then I thought that if _he_ can be glad about some of his handlers being okay to him, or—or things like that, then maybe it was okay if I was grateful in some ways for all the time I lost. That's not that bad—is it?”

“Sometimes you sound so very young,” Peggy says, with an odd note in her voice; he looks away. “I don't mean to patronize you, really I don't. It's only that I remember thinking the same thing, a very long time ago. There are some things to which we must assign meaning in order to move on from them—it's the only way I was able to survive losing _you_.” She eases a hand free and cups his face. “It's not bad at all, Steve. It's very, very good.”

Steve knows he shouldn't, but he closes his eyes and leans into it for a minute. She smells differently at the wrist than she used to. They're not allowed to wear perfumes, here, and now she uses a drop or two of peppermint oil, crisp and clean as the rest of her. He wonders for a moment what she used in 1946—the sixties, the seventies; were the options different, through the decades? He's never asked. He wonders what he might've bought her for Christmas, year after possible year.

“Tell me more about him,” says Peggy, “Your match-striking boy;” and Steve, cupping his hand over hers to keep it warm, says, “Yes, ma'am.”

 

☆

 

Sam drops by an hour later (“Hey, Carter, how're you doing? Is this weirdo bothering you?”) with marker on his temple and a sliver of blue Play-Doh under his thumbnail. Peggy taps the side of his face and laughs as he leans down to hug her. “Pictures, Sam, darling,” she says, “Don't be cruel,” and Sam lets her steal his phone out of his pocket. Steve tidies the bed and fills her hot water bottle while they coo over Sam's nieces.

“She's been really good lately, huh?” Sam says, on their way to the parking lot.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Better every time I see her. I'm trying not to think about the inevitable plateau.”

“Don't think about it, man, just enjoy the time you got. When are you leaving for England?”

“Four days.”

Sam whistles a falling note. “That's not a lot of time to wrap all those presents. Maybe I should come with and give you a hand.”

Steve grins. “Last time you visited New York in December you said it was the Seventh Circle of Hell as designed by Robert Moses.”

“Did I say that? I must've meant Stark, Tony, free food supplied by.”

“C'mon up after Christmas if you can,” Steve says, tugging him into a bear hug. Sam slaps him on the back. “We're doing vintage horror movies on New Year's Eve.”

“ _The Haunting_?” Sam says hopefully. “Hell yeah, I'm there. Have a good trip.”

There are two texts on Steve's phone when he gets into the car, both from James: _DIAF_ , the first one reads, and the second says, _Sorry, that was meant for Eva_.

 _What'd she do?_ Steve texts back, and can't check the response for twenty minutes as he clears a whole county's worth of stoplights on greens and yellows.

 _Inappropriate gift ideas, is all I'm saying_ , it reads, when he finally hits a red.

Steve laughs and sends back: _I shudder to think_.

New York is familiar chaos. It takes about as long to get through Manhattan as it did the rest of the trip, and it's dark by the time he pulls onto Park Avenue, balconies above him sparkling with lights, trees and menorahs in the high windows. Every time traffic stalls Steve puts his head out and looks up at all of it, all the people living their lives, up there, people who've lived an alien history, a whole different set of times. He feels unsettled by it, but also, oddly, comforted: the idea that Earthly life is deeply strange no matter when or where you are, and always will be, forever and ever, amen.

Steve drops the borrowed car off with the evening attendant, a middle-aged woman with dreadlocks who calls everybody 'hon', waves goodnight to JARVIS when the cameras start following him in the hall, and cooks himself dinner with Art Hodes and friends banging out of the record player; he can feel his mood dropping and needs the brass as much as he needs calories. Steve doesn't think Tony designed the Avengers' suites with acoustics in mind, but the sound curves around and fills up the hollows, taps the ceiling. It feels like a waste to hum along.

He's lonely, he realizes, in slow pieces.

It's not that loneliness is new, or unfamiliar; Steve's _been_ lonely. But the kind of lonely he was, in those gray years between waking up and _actually_ waking up, was more a condition than a feeling. A state of being he could only call loneliness later, in hindsight, when he was through and could look back down into the valley of it. The places it'd taken him. Or, really: the places he'd taken it, schlepping it around on his back like a donkey.

( _“Sarah,” Steve says, in August, in the hot dark, “My ma,” aware that talking about his mother while he's naked in bed is probably some kind of faux pas, and deciding not to care. “I always thought I'd have more time. Or really I didn't think about it at all, and then she was gone. I want,” he says, “A lot of time with you.”_

 _“You will,” James says, and puts his hand over Steve's eyes, but in the dark Steve thinks: more, though; I want more, I want more than snatches, I want—_ )

Standing in the life he's clawed together for himself here, in New York, he can't help thinking about the bungalow, the front door that doesn't quite seal and the damp that never quite dries, the awkward washroom and the shrieking pipes, and above all that the warmth and closeness James has drawn about the place like a blanket, the beautiful people he's collected around himself. Eva told Steve once that they weren't an especially close-knit bunch before James came along and somehow shoved them all into each other's pockets. It's always seemed ridiculous to Steve that he could miss James as much as he does, when they see each other on a computer screen nearly every day and in person every couple of months at the outside—Christ, some military families hardly get _that_. But suddenly, standing in his bright, warm, open kitchen, Steve wants to be in that crummy cottage in England so bad it hurts.

 _Four days_ , he tells himself, and turns up the volume.

 

☆

 

For a long, grasping moment after he wakes up at the crack of dawn, feeling disoriented and fuzzy, Steve can't remember what today is, what yesterday was. Then: reality settles. Tai chi and green tea was yesterday, so today's yoga and Loose Leaf Surprise, which is the end result of Betty going into David's Teas once when she was out drinking with a friend and asking for samplers of everything. It's been about a year and Steve doesn't think they're halfway through the basket.

Darcy usually joins them on yoga days, but she isn't there when Steve arrives.

“Flu,” Bruce says. “And no, before you ask, I didn't lecture her about forgetting her shot—she did it for me. Terrifying impression, actually. Don't ask her to do you. I felt a little naked.”

“Too late,” Steve says. “Ask her to do one of my bond skits some time.”

They ease into a relaxing routine, but Steve finds himself wishing it was one of the more active ones; he wants to clear the cobwebs and questions out of his brain. He won't have time after yoga, but maybe after work he'll swim laps or take a run. He can't run properly in Sussex without drawing attention to himself, so he'd better fit in as many as he needs before he goes. James can't run at all, it's too high-impact for his degenerated joints, but he's been talking about getting a compact exercise machine to see if he can't keep a little more weight on. _Really_ compact, James'd said, ruefully. Maybe Steve could—

“You're thinking too much,” Bruce says. Bruce doesn't quite have Darcy's flexibility, built sturdy as he is, but he's still limber enough to pull his leg up to his chest, stretch it out, and prod Steve hard in the hip with his toes. Startled—it must be a pressure point—Steve tips over sideways. “Leave it off the mat.”

“ _I'm_ off the mat,” Steve shoots back. Instead of getting up, since the clock says they're nearly done, he splays out like a starfish and breathes deep, foam under one shoulder and hardwood under the other. In the top of his peripheral vision he can see outside, the tops of skyscrapers, the iron-gray clouds. They're predicting a storm; wind, though, not snow. It's been a dry winter. Bruce settles into Extended Child's Pose and sighs out long.

When he rolls over into Corpse, Bruce says, “What's getting your goat? You don't have to say, unless Tony's doing something questionable, in which case...”

“Nothing like that, it's only—I miss my guy,” Steve says, and grimaces, trying to over-exaggerate it so it seems funny instead of sad. “I know, it's dumb.”

“Just because it's standard doesn't mean you're not feeling it.”

“How do you deal with Betty being away so much?” Steve asks. Betty's Peace Corps deployments usually take her to Guinea for six months out of the year, sometimes longer, and in places that don't get much more than patchy satellite phone reception for emergencies. Steve can't imagine it, in the sense that he can, actually, and doesn't want to.

“I assume you mean besides the usual baloney about commitment and communication,” Bruce says. He looks contrite. “I don't mean that. It's not baloney. But you know what I mean. If you're not taking it seriously then there's no point in even asking. Besides that? Lying to myself, mostly.” Bruce sits up in one fluid motion, crossing his legs and putting his hands on his knees, elbows akimbo. “Sometimes I pretend she's just gone out for groceries and she'll be back soon. Sometimes I tell myself it's payback for the three years I spent running away from the big guy. If she could live with not knowing where the hell I was, so can I.” He shrugs. “None of what I have could be classed as 'good advice'.”

“Wasn't so much asking for advice as much as, I dunno. Perspective.”

“You're alive,” Bruce says, almost cautiously, like he's wondering if Steve'll take it as a joke. Steve doesn't laugh. “You have him, and it works. In my experience it usually doesn't. Most people make the mistake—I mean, don't get me wrong, we're certainly not the paradigm. But it seems to me a lot of people make the mistake of thinking someone else is their other half, full stop, and that never ends well, especially when there's distance involved. Everybody has to have their own lives, too. Betty says the best part of a relationship is the independence—you get a different set of freedoms. But perspective's not much help, really.”

“Well,” Steve ventures, “It _helps_ ,” and Bruce says, “Yeah, in a hairshirt-and-flagellation kind of way,” and Steve...has to concede that point.

“I know someone whose husband is on his second twenty-seven month deployment,” Bruce says, as they're rolling up their mats. “They make it work, but she says she sometimes wonders who's going to come home. You can change a lot in two years.”

 _I don't know who, but_ one _of us needs to get that on a tee-shirt_ , Steve thinks, and, startled by the time and his distance from the shower, he gets a bit of that run he wanted, after all.

 

☆

 

Steve's supposed to go for breakfast with Pepper, Maria, and Natasha, but when he arrives late to their usual table with his hair still wet, there's only one chair occupied. Natasha raises her eyebrows and her coffee mug at him as he sits down, feeling awkward and uncertain. It's the first time they've been alone together without one or more diffusing parties orchestrating the conversation: the first time since DC, Steve holding James's letter and listening to the sound of her engine roaring into the distance and wondering what the hell came next. The gap between them that never quite closed, amicable only because they never talked about it. He sees her thinking—is he reading her right, after all this time?—thinking about the same thing, and the moment where she could pin him to the wall and doesn't.

“Bureaucratic emergency,” Natasha says, “Or so I'm told,” to the question he doesn't ask. The waitress brings Steve a menu and a glass of water. When she leaves: “I like the beard. I don't think I've said.”

“I like the hair,” he replies. It's been freshly bobbed at her chin, the same length all the way around, and she's quit bothering to straighten it. It looks bohemian, young. He thinks it'll suit her sometimes; it suits her now.

“I did it in my bathtub with a pair of safety scissors and a bottle of wine.”

“Thanks for that image,” he says. She grins crookedly, hot. “Straight out of the bottle?”

“Yup.”

“Cheap?”

“No,” Natasha says, “Disgustingly vintage, Tony fobbed it off on me,” raising her chin, “You don't drink cheap wine out of the _bottle_ , Steve, that's just depressing,” and Steve says: “I've missed this.”

She looks at him.

“I miss this,” he says. “Just—” He swallows. His hands are together on the table in front of him, fingers linked like he's about to say grace, and Natasha reaches across and puts her hand on top.

“Talking trash,” Natasha finishes for him. Too blandly for it to be neutral, “People do drift apart, you know.”

“We didn't, though,” Steve says. “We— _I_. I stopped trying.”

“It takes two to tango. I could've pushed. Maybe I should have.”

Doubtfully: “Maybe.” He finds himself starting to laugh. “You'd think I'd be better at this. Plenty of practice lately. Last twenty-four hours've been one difficult conversation after another.”

“Then let's not,” Natasha says, and when he squints at her she's smiling, but there's no cruelty in it. He doesn't think she's teasing him. “What—you _want_ it to be difficult? Let's not. Let's bitch. What's the most infuriating book you've read this year?”

“ _The Proof of Love_ ,” Steve says automatically. “If people could stop writing tragic endings for queer folks I'd be really, really okay with that,” and by the time their orders come it feels like they haven't skipped a single beat: why did Steve think this would be difficult, again? He wants to be angry at himself and can't, not when they're sniping at each other in a crowded restaurant, probably sounding like a couple on the verge of a break-up; the wait-staff doubtless think they're demented. Then again, this is New York. If somebody hasn't walked in here with their pet alligator already this week, he'll eat his shirt.

But— “I don't know why,” Steve feels compelled to say, after Natasha insists on walking him to the VA. “I didn't have any kind of good reason for giving up on you like that.”

“Ninety percent of reason is hindsight,” Natasha says. “You didn't have to have one. And it _was_ a betrayal, Rogers. I would've understood if you'd been angry at me. I would've yelled back, but I would've understood.”

“It wasn't a betrayal! You did the right thing, you were helping him, you—”

“That doesn't mean it didn't hurt.”

“It did hurt,” Steve admits. She tucks her hair behind her ear and gives him an ironic look. “But I like to think I'm not that dumb. It's just...unprofessional. Letting something like that get in the way. We were agents, we're supposed to be—stop that!” as she pretends to hide laughter behind her hand.

“You,” Natasha says, “Were a terrible agent. Number eight on my Top Ten Worst Spies list.”

He can't even bring himself to be offended. “Only number eight? Who's number one?”

“Well, I could tell you,” Natasha says, “But then I'd have to kill you,” they say together, as they draw up in front of the VA, and Steve rolls his eyes and says, “God, I missed you.”

Natasha tugs the lapel of his coat and makes him bend over so she can grab his face with both hands. He expects her to kiss his forehead, but she plants one right at the corner of his mouth like his mother used to do, rushing out the door on her way to work. Natasha scuffs her thumb over it as if she's wiping off a lipstick print, but he's going to check the first reflective surface anyway.

“Not gonna see if I've improved any?” Steve asks, giving her the option to rag him; she deserves a free shot.

“Why?” she says sweetly: “Have you been practicing?”

“Yeah. J's dog is a _great_ teacher, I think we've really hit it off,” and she pushes him away from her, pretending to splutter and wipe her mouth. Point to Rogers, Steve thinks, grinning. He walks backwards through the doors and waves until she's out of sight.

Steve only has one class today, watercolor with his elderly vets. Since they're mostly at the stage where they can be left to their own devices, he uses the time to set up what he only realizes halfway through is a painting of Natasha, cutting her hair in an empty bathtub, a hand mirror pressed against the tile with her toes and an exaggerated expression of focus on her face. It's classy and a little naughty, exactly like the pin-ups Steve used to churn out by the handful in '39, red-lipsticked girls caught in candid moments. He pencils in a tipped-over wine bottle and catches himself biting his lip to rein in a smile. Florence calls him over for glazing advice; Ernie wants to try the salt trick. The day goes on.

Afternoon finds Steve back up on his scaffold, re-painting the faded strip of greenery that trails around the Group Therapy room. Given the age of the building, it might be nearly as old as him. He's humming _The Last Time I Saw Paris_ when he hears someone come into the room, hesitatingly, like they're looking for something.

“With you in a second,” Steve says.

“Captain Rogers? Olajide at the desk said I'd find you back here.”

“Steve,” he says automatically, pulling out a long line of paint. He's surprised when he turns. He'd expected the voice to belong to a smaller, older woman, but the lady beside the scaffold is in her late twenties at most, and almost as tall as him. She's a spangle of color, and at first he doesn't know where to look. Between her yellow skirt, her turquoise blouse, her bleached crew cut, and the red wartime-style scarf that matches her lipstick, it takes him a good few moments to notice the forearm crutches.

“Steve. Sorry to bother you,” she says. “I know I ain't exactly La Presidenta.”

Oh.

 _Oh_.

Holy god.

Steve puts down his paints and clamors off the scaffold, nearly falling. “Miss _Castillo_?”

She pulls a face made especially strange by the lipstick, and the juxtaposition of what Steve remembers—Christ, he didn't recognize her at all. She's gained weight, and the grey undertone her skin had on television has been replaced by sunshine. “If you're gonna _ma'am_ me, I'm gonna _sir_ you, sweetheart, and I don't think either of us can pull off that kinda dignity in a rec room.”

Steve, startled, laughs. “Do I rate calling you Tank?” he asks, and she grins with all her teeth. He isn't sure whether he should extend a hand, but she's already leaning on her left crutch and offering her heavily inked one. They shake. “And you're not bothering me at all. You want a coffee?”

“Depends. Is it awful?”

“La Brea wishes it could make tar that thick,” Steve admits.

“Perfect,” says Tank.

 

☆

 

“He said he was okay on the phone,” Tank says, fiddling with the edge of her bandana, “And god knows that kid can't bullshit his way out of a paper bag, but—shit, you can't help _worrying_ sometimes, y'know? Anyway, Sofie's up here for three days on an AP History trip, so I thought I'd help chaperone on account of I've never been, but they got too many adults and the kids are gettin' antsy. So. Here I am, abasing my sorry self on your doorstep.”

“What did you want to know?” Steve asks. “I know he called you, but he's never said what-all you talked about.”

“Is he okay?” Tank asks, a little unsteadily. Steve feels a lump rise in his throat. He's been there; god has he ever been there. “Really and truly? I keep tryin'a imagine him in _England_ , of all places, and. Well, it's dumb. To be perfectly fuckin' frank, we didn't none of us _know_ him at all. There wasn't anything much to know. He was the Lady fucking Amalthea, all hurt and no history. Just—” Skeptical, but hopeful, because Steve's nodding: “Really?”

“I'm not saying he'd turn down three wishes if a genie appeared,” Steve says, “But yeah. He's—he really is. He's got a dog, great neighbors, lots of kids around.”

Tank exhales loudly and flops back in her chair. One of her crutches falls to the floor. “Madre de Dios,” she says. “Oh thank _god_. It was killin' me, imagining him all on his lonesome. If there's anybody who needs to be with people, it's that poor sorry son of a bitch. You know he slept on a broken couch for eight months because he didn't wanna be alone? In his _sleep_?”

Christ. That puts a few things from James's recovery into perspective.

“I guess you probably ain't real pleased with me,” Tank says, before Steve can think of a response. “Considering my conduct, and all.”

“Shit,” Steve says; it's startled out of him. He's never sworn in front of a lady before, but there's a first for everything. “Miss Castillo—Tank. I really couldn't care less about whatever substances were going around. You could've left him where you found him. You had no obligation whatsoever to help him, but you did anyway. Him and plenty of other people, if what J's said is true, so you haven't got a damned thing to be ashamed of in my books.”

“ _He's_ one to talk,” Tank says. “You know how goddamn much he's donated? How much we needed it? Piss-poor the way we treat the vulnerable in this country. Two years ago we were this close to up and shutting down the House on account of we were getting robbed every other weekend and we couldn't hardly afford a fuckin' secretary, but now we got two defense instructors, eight counselors, a daycare—we built an extra wing of _beds_ last summer and in the spring we're cuttin' the ribbon on a whole _new_ place just for queer 'n trans kids. You know how many fucking lives he's fucking saved?” She pounds her fist once on the arm of the chair and looks away, jaw set. Furiously affectionate: “That _asshole_.”

“He talks the same way about you,” Steve says. “I'm—I'm real glad you were there for him. When I wasn't.”

Tank shakes her head; not disagreeing, he thinks, just a gesture. After a moment: “I thought he was gonna die, honestly. He was all...” She gestures at her belly and makes an awful face. “Smashed up inside. Purple from neck to dick, and that's after he walked from fuckin' _DC_ , he said. Threw up everything we gave him and pissed blood for a week. I ain't never seen a man come back from a thing like that.” She looks at him. “What happened? Really? There wasn't nothing on the news.”

“A—a girder,” he says, “Part of the helicarrier, it was a big steel—”

“Fuck,” Tank says.

“And then he fished me out of the river after I dislocated his arm, so.” Steve winces. “A lot of compound damage.”

She shakes her head again, slower.

“He's okay now,” Steve reminds her. “He's got a feeding tube, and he can even eat a few things without getting sick. He takes care of the neighbor kids. Gardens. A regular old life.”

“And fuckin' _art_ ,” Tank says. “Got that painting for Sofie in the mail and damn near keeled over. Where the fuck did that come from, huh?”

Steve chews his lip. “Has he told you anything—specific? About—”

“I know he was James Buchanan Goddamn Barnes, if that's what you ain't saying.”

“Then, well.” Steve makes a helpless gesture. “That. Sort of. It's complicated?”

“Understatement of the fucking year,” she says, and both of them laugh, edgy. “Listen: he's a fuckin' miracle. That's how we all thought of him, me and all them girls watching him turn into a human being. You tell him that, next time you see him. You tell him that from me.”

“Tell him yourself,” Steve says, “He called you, you know he's got a,” and stops.

“What?” Tank says.

“When does Sofia get out of school for the year?” Steve says quickly. He has a feeling like a firecracker in his chest, sparkling away. Tank's mouth falls open. “Could you—could the two of you get away? Even for just a couple of days? I'm heading over on the 21st, and—”

“You serious?”

“I mean, if you think it's a bad idea or you can't manage it, it's fine, but if you want to I'm sure he'd—”

“What the _hell_ kind of motherfucking shitty _dumbfuck question is that_?” Tank shouts, which Steve thinks, on balance, is probably a yes.

 

☆

 

Steve's well accustomed at this point to flying the kind of fiddly, over-teched light aircraft Tony prefers to keep in his hanger, but it's been a long damn time since he's flown with passengers; he's sweating bullets for more reasons than one as he lands at the airfield. It could be worse. The weather's decent the whole way, and Tank, who's never flown, spends most of the flight with her seat reclined and a scarf over her face, napping or pretending to. Sofia stays up front with Steve, quietly asking enough questions that Steve's pretty sure that by the time they touch down, despite the blind eye she covers with a strategic part in her curly black hair, she could probably take over in an emergency. He's surprised to find out she's sixteen. She looks much younger, in her midi skirt and tights, her soft voice.

Steve gets real food into all three of them before he calls a taxi. He usually walks from the airfield, but it's a good forty-five minutes even for him, and between the luggage and the folding wheelchair and the crutches, it's too much. Luckily, the bungalow isn't too far from the B&B Steve'd barely managed to convince Tank to let him pay for. Ground floor, old-fashioned facilities, miniature goats in the yard; Sofia thinks she's died and gone to heaven. Steve goes outside with her while Tank freshens up. The goats are talkative and a lot friendlier than previous ungulates Steve's met, and they seem to sense Sofia's more enthusiastic about them than him, clustering around her and nosing her skirt for possible pockets.

“I like animals,” she says, when he remarks on it.

“Yeah? You think you'll want to work with them? Veterinary stuff?”

“No,” Sofia says. “I don't think I could work with sick animals all the time. I wanna go to university and be a research librarian and have ten cats.”

Cripes. Steve doesn't think he was that sure what he wanted to do at _twenty_. “Eva, J's neighbor—she'd love to talk to you about books. She's an English professor.”

Sofia's over inspecting the goat house with her new friends when Tank makes her cautious, dragging way outside, looking cross. By the time she's reached him he's made a guess that it's nerves, not irritation, and he's proven right when she says, “Fuck. Ain't been this shaky since the agonies.”

“He'll be real glad you're here,” Steve says. She grunts. “Can't be worse than the first time I saw him after a year and a half. I was wearing clothes three sizes too big and a bad dye job, and I didn't even know he was going to _be_ there.”

“I'm jetlagged and PMSing. S'gonna be all hayfever up in here the second I clap eyes on his goddamn face.”

“Will it help if I say it'll probably be mutual?”

“Not really,” Tank says.

They watch Sofia scratching two goats behind their horns while another lips at her hair from on top of its platform. She flinches away, scrunching her nose up and laughing, and the big smile she aims at Tank isn't shy at all.

“Well, that's it, guess we live here,” Tank says. “She's never gonna wanna go home now.”

Steve takes a risk. “Smack me if this is too personal, but—did you raise her on your own?”

“More or less,” Tank says. “After our dad died Mama kinda went off the deep end, made a lotta dumb choices I'd tell myself were survival when I did 'em my own self a few years down the road. Foster folks were gonna take us away and we figured, well, shit, everybody's gonna want the cute kid and ain't _nobody_ gonna want the baby dyke, so we ran away. Things I heard come outta the foster system later, wasn't the stupidest thing we coulda done, but it was still pretty fucking stupid.”

Steve gestures at the evidence in front of them. “Seems to me you did a damn good job, all things considered.”

Tank laughs like he's made a real knee-slapper of a joke. She's grinning wide when he glances at her. “That's _exactly_ what my mama said when she found us in the hospital. Clean for six years and lookin' for us for five—wouldn't ever've found us, probably, if I hadn't got shot. Funny old world, sometimes.”

“You can say that again,” Steve says.

 

☆

 

Miss Havisham greets them at the door, boofing quietly and bouncing on his toes. Tank makes a hilarious face. Sofia, as Steve expects, kneels down immediately and gives Miss Havisham a big hug. Steve tries not to get distracted by the warm feeling in his belly, the smells he's come to associate with _home_ and _here_ and _James_.

“You around?” Steve calls.

“In the kitchen,” James calls back.

“You got pants on?”

“Yeah, but I can change that if you like, sweetheart.”

Steve covers his eyes with his hand, but not fast enough to miss Tank smirk at him despite her anxiety. “Uh—raincheck,” he shouts, while Sofia takes Tank's coat and gives her a boost out of the wheelchair. Steve holds one forearm crutch steady, then the other, waiting until she has her balance. He whispers, “Go on. Kitchen's at the end of the hall. Worst you're gonna do is make him drop a plate.”

Steve hangs up their coats on the rack as they start to go, Sofia's hand in the small of her sister's back, Tank's slow white-knuckled progress, the braces shifting on her biceps, distorting her blouse: crutch, crutch, swing, swing, one dragging step after another. Every inch looks like a victory. After half a minute of that, he can't watch any longer; it feels like seeing under her clothes, knowing as personally as he does that pain, that obstinacy, what it's taken her to stand up and say to gravity: _fuck you_.

Steve clips on Miss Havisham's leash and quietly lets himself out.

To the village proper and back is half an hour, but Steve isn't sure that's nearly long enough. Even after a detour around some of the back-country lanes, and almost getting lost, it still feels too early to go back and disturb them—James would text, surely, if he wanted Steve back this soon—but it's starting to get dark. He could go up to Eva and Tabby's place, but then he'd have to pass the bungalow, and he doesn't want to make James or Tank feel uncomfortable. Which leaves...

“Oh, _Bruder_ ,” says Jakob, when he opens the door. “Come in, then.” Steve shuts the door behind himself and bends to take off his shoes as Jakob toddles away. Miss Havisham wanders off to look for Tobermory. From the sitting room: “Gert is with Evangeline if you are preferring a woman's advice. So you have had a domestic?”

Steve comes in to find Jakob moving a stack of newspaper off the far armchair. He likes the cozy clutter of their house, which he's only been into twice: books in German and Hebrew on every surface, Gertie's pile of literary fiction beside her rocking chair; the wax-spotted menorah in the window, on a piece of foil, that hasn't been put away yet. There's new brick around the fireplace. “A what?”

“A fight,” Jakob clarifies.

“No, god no,” Steve says. Jakob sits lengthwise on the sofa like it's a chaise, and flaps a hand at him, so Steve sits down. “I brought an old friend of his to visit.”

“How you can make it sound so dire! Is this bad? Friends are always good. If they are not good they are not friends.”

“It's complicated. They met at, uh—a tough time in J's life. In both of their lives, actually.”

“Ahhh,” Jakob says knowingly. He nods. “This is a difficult thing.”

“They'll be okay.” Too sincere, like he's trying to convince himself. Jakob gives him a Look. “Yeah, okay,” Steve says. “I was so sure I'd done the right thing this morning. Maybe I'm just tired.”

“Is a long flight. Are you hungry?”

“We had croque-madame at the Hummingbird.”

“Not what I asked.”

“I could eat,” Steve allows.

Jakob nods approvingly and levers himself to his feet. “Then you will solve for us our problem of having too much pie.”

That's how James finds them: standing at the counter with pastry and ice cream and a bottle of schnapps between them, Steve coughing like he's dying because Jakob timed the punchline to his mohel joke with lethal precision. The first indication Steve has that James is even in the room is his laughter; the second is James's arm around his neck.

“If you're planning on continuing to escalate your Christmas gifts,” James murmurs in his ear, “Next year I'd like a pony.”

“It's right here,” Steve says, as Miss Havisham blunders between their legs. James snorts.

“Look what Tank brought me,” James says, stepping back and unzipping his jacket. Underneath, he's wearing a shirt with a cartoon tyrannosaurus on the front. The text around it says: IF YOU'RE HAPPY AND YOU KNOW IT, CLAP YOUR...OH.

Jakob cackles.

“Oh my god,” Steve says.

James beams at him. His eyes are red and his hair is a disaster, but he looks—god. Shining. Like a million bucks. Steve's glad they've got an audience, or he might've done something embarrassing by now. James says, “I'm gonna take them over to meet Eva and Tabby and the kids. You coming? Jakob?”

“No, no,” Jakob says, making shooing motions, “I will enjoy the quiet. In fact take the dog. Take the pie. _Geh weg_!”

“Going,” James says, laughing. He doesn't say anything more until they're outside, Tobermory and Miss Havisham dancing in the cold air and chewing on each other's leashes, and then he stops out front of the bungalow and says, “So how long's this been in the works, huh?”

“Since Monday,” Steve says. “We ran into each other, sort of. It was pretty impulsive. Was it okay? I didn't—”

“You made my goddamn year.” James takes advantage of Steve's open mouth to kiss him, soft, and then for a moment almost savage, his fist in Steve's hair. When he lets Steve breathe: “Don't give me that. You know exactly how much she means to me, you little shit. I wasn't sure you'd ever...”

“Ever what?”

“I thought maybe you'd be jealous of her,” James says. “What with—”

“She saved your _life_ ,” Steve says. “Maybe I wish I'd been in her shoes, but frankly she did a better job than I'd've done, you fresh out of nothing and me expecting you to be somebody else. Jealousy's got nothing to do with it.”

“Are we gonna forget how much _you_ did for me afterwards, because the way I remember it—”

“You were the one who dug yourself out, I just—”

“Jesus _wept_ ,” Tank says, and both of them startle; Steve didn't hear her leave the house. Sofia's beside her, holding a hurricane lamp and covering a smile with her hand. “If I'd known it was Martyrs Anonymous out here I'd'a brung my cross. Are y'all done pulling pigtails? I was promised cute Englishwomen.”

“After you, sweetheart,” James says. “We keeping up with this dick-measuring competition, or are you gonna take your chair?”

Tank grins like a knife. “Looks like you need it more'n I do, Roosevelt.”

James peels himself off of Steve and offers his stump to Sofia, who drops a little curtsy and switches the lamp to her other hand. “C'mon, Sof,” James says. Over his shoulder: “Last one there's a loser!”

“The hell are you doing up there, then?” Steve calls. James's loud, flat “Ha!” drifts back to them. Steve sticks his hands in his pockets and turns to Tank. “So, what're your very worst feelings on the Welfare Reform Act?”

“Rogers,” says Tank, starting slowly down the lane: “I do believe you and me are gonna be real good friends.”

**Author's Note:**

> One more ficlet to go! I can't believe it's almost over! Thanks so much for joining me. <3


End file.
